 "The Crookie never crumbles: The French pastry that has got people salivating")
The times of cookie has gone. The crookie has become the latest ‘insane’ bakery trend. It is a fusion between a cookie and a croissant. Crookies began as ‘just something for regulars’, according to the Parisian baker who invented them, but in 2023, a viral TikTok video sent sales soaring. Crookie imitations can now be found everywhere from New York to Hong Kong, following in the footsteps of previous pastry crazes like Dominique Ansel’s cronut.
The Crookie
A bemused Paris bakery owner has been besieged by smartphone-wielding youngsters over the past year, keen to snap themselves with the latest pastry craze: the crookie.
A croissant filled with cookie dough might sound like a fistful of heart attack, but everyone knows it’s going to be tasty, even when all they’ve seen is a viral TikTok video.
The crookie was invented by Parisian pastry chef Stephane Louvard in 2022.
It was “just something for regulars”, he said, until a video by Instagram account “The Ultimate Guide”, which specialises in Paris restaurants, drove sales up to 150-200 per day.
Then in early 2023, TikTok influencer Johan Papz filmed himself taking a satisfying bite into one of Louvard’s crookies, and things went crazy.
“We had hundreds of people coming, most of them young women between 18- and 25-years-old, smartphones in hand to take photos with them,” Louvard told AFP in his kitchen as workers rushed to spread cookie dough into croissants.
Impact Shorts
More Shorts‘A bit insane’
In the weeks that followed, the queue never seemed to diminish in front of the bakery. Production is now between 1,000 and 1,600 crookies per day and Louvard has had to hire two extra workers.
He is pleased, but somewhat bemused, over the craze.
“I mean, it’s a bit insane,” he said.
“At some point you have to stop. It’s just some cookie in a croissant, it’s not some revolutionary invention.”
Thanks to TikTok, Maison Louvard now has imitators around the world, with crookies spotted in Brussels, New York, Tel Aviv and Singapore.
Louvard has no interest in filing a patent, however.
“What for? To find myself in court with half the planet?” he said.
Other pastry crazes
It is not the first pastry craze to tickle the world’s taste buds.
In 2013, New Yorkers slept on the pavement outside Dominique Ansel’s bakery after he invented the cronut — half-croissant, half-donut.
In 2022, the New York Roll, a mixture of croissant and bombolone (an Italian pastry) turned into a frenzy, with videos featuring the cake accumulating hundreds of millions of views on TikTok, driving a hunt for more baked crazes.
With inputs from AFP
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